


kept her hair and made it a crown

by kwritten



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Keyverse, Sorry Not Sorry, anway this is me telling you from beyond the grave that, implied/background/eventual Spike/Dawn... if you squint?, spike/dawn is the ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 01:17:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10547576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: for the prompt: how do you engineer a force of nature and expect it to be humanaka: Dawn is Rapunzel and Connor is the poor prince that didn't realize she was both the witch and the princess and the rose thorns at the end of the story all wrapped into one





	

It's like a terrible song when you are already three sheets to the wind and there's something in his skin that doesn't fit around his bones and it feels like your own and so you drink him up like wine like you are a priestess or you are the god and he's giving you everything. 

 

It's never enough. 

 

Nothing is ever enough.

 

"Oh hey, have we met?"  
"What, you don't remember the people you've met?"  
"It's hard to explain."  
"Try me."  
"I don't begin and end in the same place."

You buy him a drink because he lost the bet and your beginnings are even more fragmented than his. 

 

That's okay, she takes him to bed anyway. 

 

Maybe this is what absolution is:  
agreeing that you shouldn't exist  
and finding someone on the other side of that statement  
that isn't the girl in the mirror. 

Existence is overrated. 

 

She runs away. Like his mother, in some ways, he thinks. 

Women run, his father says over a glass of something brown and dark and too thick to be for human consumption. 

Summers women run fast, the blonde one says from the corner, a smirk on his face like he knows exactly where she went and if it wasn't for some kind of blood rite under the light of a full moon, he'd be dead for daring to even think about touching her. What kind of girl earns a guard dog like that?

What kind of rabid dog obeys any girl at all?

((Spoilers: she is no girl and he is no dog and he is no boy and that's not a father that's a demon and everything is hell even if they all know hell is something else entirely.))

 

"Would you go back?" she's smoking a cigarette with her back to the open door, the blue light of the television from the other room casting her silhouette in a way that feels dangerous. He didn't even know she smoked. 

Maybe just some versions of her do. 

Maybe some versions of him do, too. Now. 

"Back? There? Hell, no."

He's certain. 

She likes that. 

She lets him kiss her again and later he'll realize it was a gift. 

 

When you build a girl out of words you curse her with all the terrible truths that words tell her. None of them are true, of course. But if you rip everyone down to their skin and blood and bones... well those are just words, aren't they? What were you trying to prove?

When you build a girl out of words you curse her with all the terrible truths that words have always told all girls about what lies in their hearts, beneath their bones. You can't blame a girl for being what you made her. 

 

She's like a fairytale, he thinks. 

"Maybe last time you found me in a tower and it was only after the witch made you blind and cast you into the desert that you realized it was a bad idea, climbing up my hair in the first place," she says placidly. 

Her long brown hair is wrapped around his hand and he's nearing ecstasy so it isn't until much, much later that he realizes that he never spoke aloud. 

It's too late by then, of course. 

As if he could have predicted this. 

 

Her guard dog is gone, too. 

Which sends a chill up his spine whenever he thinks of it. 

 

 

"Twins," she gasps with glee. "Just like the story."

Spike smooths back the sweat-soaked hair off of her face and grimaces as the squalling red bundles in her arms. It will be dark soon and there's all sorts of creepy crawlies that would love to take a bite out of something so small and helpless.

He doesn't ask if she's sure - there's something about watching her turn herself inside out and rewriting the world around him with just a sigh that provokes a certain surety of purpose. 

"You just gave birth in the middle of a desert in hell, everyone at home wants to know, what's next?" he used his radio-announcer voice to break some levity into the silence around them. 

She grins up at him, ready.

 

Rule.

 

 

He drinks whiskey with his father and develops a bald spot on the crown of his head and gets older and weaker and watches his body fall slowly apart and time goes on and he goes on. He marries a girl with calm eyes and a normal name and a beginning less auspicious than his own and a definite end in sight. They have three children who grow to resent him and grow out of his fantastic stories far too quickly. He becomes the mundane thing he always wanted to be. 

 

She doesn't do any of those things.


End file.
